


you can be my sweetheart now

by batyatoon



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Betrayal, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, Missing Scene, Plot Hole Repair, Why Is Everything Terrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:55:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7715644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/pseuds/batyatoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Eight sorts through memories, and makes some bad decisions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. and when the feast is over

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [BethCGPhoenix](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BethCGPhoenix) and [silveraspen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/silveraspen), who listened patiently to my crackpot theories.
> 
> I'll admit it, I didn't spot the plot hole in "Face of the Enemy" until I rewatched it with the hope of finding some slim evidence that Sweet Eight was lying about New Caprica. Of course, looked at another way, said plot hole becomes evidence that Sweet Eight was lying about _everything_.
> 
> Which raised the question of why.
> 
> (The titles are from Janis Ian's "[Murdering Stravinsky](https://youtu.be/-jl8sxkpw_U).")

Her name is Sharon. She’s considered thinking of a different name for herself, the way the Sixes sometimes do, calling herself Gina or Natalie or Sonja or something else entirely, but she’s never come up with a name that seems to fit; she’s Sharon, the way she’s Eight. Any other name would be a lie.

Maybe it’s different when someone else gives you a different name, though. _Valerii_ wasn’t ever really her name, even though there is a set of memories that insists it was, that remembers learning to write it in school as a little girl, **Sharon Valerii** in large careful letters on double-lined paper.

(She knows perfectly well that she was never a little girl.)

But _Boomer_ was a name that the Colonial Fleet gave to one Eight, and _Athena_ to another, and those feel like real names; those feel like they belong to only one of her sisters, not to all of them. Not to her.

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about that feeling. They’re all _Sharon_ , they’re all _Eight_ , but only one of them can ever be _Athena_. Even though she’s touched those memories, the ones that make Athena different from the rest of them, touched them and incorporated them so that she remembers being Athena … somehow that’s different. Somehow that doesn’t make them the same.

Well, obviously it doesn’t make them the same, or else she would have snatched her hand out of the datastream and gone running for a Raider to fly back to _Galactica_. She can feel that sense of belonging there, that fierce urgency to be with her crewmates and her husband and daughter, but she feels it the way one might feel the silkiness of a fabric or the roughness of scorched metal against fingertips: something outside oneself, something one can touch without becoming it. She knows _Galactica_ as well as Athena does, but somehow it isn’t her home.

For that matter, if absorbing the memories made her the same as the person who lived through them, she would have sided with Cavil the way Boomer did, instead of fleeing with the rest of her sisters and the Sixes and the Twos. She isn’t Boomer, and she isn’t Athena.

(Maybe it only works when someone human gives you a name. But no, that wouldn’t explain the Sixes; they always choose their own.)

It’s harder to say whether or not she’s the same person as one particular Sharon who looked up to Boomer and Caprica Six a few years ago on Cylon-settled Caprica, admired them desperately, supported their bid to try to make peace with the humans. Maybe that’s because she was far from the only one; almost all the Eights stood behind the two heroes, stepped eagerly out onto the cold soil of the planet they called New Caprica, ready to live together in peace as soon as the humans could be made to allow it.

It’s even harder to say whether or not she’s the Sharon who fell in love with a human shortly after they arrived on New Caprica, especially since it’s so hard to say whether or not falling in love is what really happened there.

Three Sharons fell in love -- why not call it that, it’s as good a description as any of what happened -- fell in love with humans, each with a different human, all of them men. Chief Galen Tyrol, the mechanic. Karl “Helo” Agathon, the fighter pilot. And Felix Gaeta, once the lieutenant and communications officer, then the advisor to President Gaius Baltar, then … well, still an advisor to Baltar, still a member of his cabinet, but struggling with it almost every moment from the arrival of the Cylon. Even before the imprisonments began, and the interrogations, and the executions.

She saw his face one evening as he left his desk to go home for the night, shrugging into his coat with unconsciously sharp angry movements, and followed him as silently as she could. And waited in the shadow of the ship that served as a presidential building (such strange ships humans build, all convex curves like encircling arms, holding themselves within themselves, nothing outward-reaching), waited and watched him look up at the sky in an unguarded moment of helpless pain.

And she followed him to his tent, said his name softly as he opened the flap, reached out a hand to him as he stiffened and turned to her with dread in his face. _Please_ , she said without knowing she was going to, _I’m sorry. Please let me help_.

They made the first list that night. Names of people he hadn’t seen in too long, people who might be in the detention center, rounded up randomly or secretly, might be fled, might be dead. _The Ones_ , she told him, _they keep good records. If somebody’s locked up, I can find them. And get them out_.

She remembers thinking later how stupid she’d been, to think it would be that easy. There were dreams afterwards, recurring nightmares of making her way through an endless prison. Sometimes she was trying to carry water in a cracked cup to someone dying of thirst, sometimes trying to pull away concrete blocks slowly crushing someone to death, every moment terrified (as she had been in the real detention center) of being discovered by a passing One. Sometimes the prisoners were humans, sometimes her sisters and brothers. Once one of them was Felix.

Too many failures, too many lost without even the chance to save them: the woman who hanged herself with her own stockings, the man who died of a fever that no one bothered to treat. The married couple she couldn’t help envying, even in their separate cells, even in their anguish over their missing child. A little girl. Like Hera, who was never her daughter, who was never Boomer’s daughter either.

( _Nobody knows what happened to the child_ , she told Felix. It was true when she told him. She didn’t learn until months later about how one of the Leobens had abstracted her to a different part of the detention center, to put her in with Kara Thrace.)

She remembers weeping as she told him how she’d failed. She remembers him reassuring her, telling her it would be all right, she’d saved so many, they could keep trying. She remembers the the look in his eyes, the moment of thinking as he leaned in to kiss her: _oh. This is what it’s like_.

She never did find out how many of the humans she saved for Felix Gaeta’s sake turned out to be members of the Resistance, or whether any of them were involved in the bombings that came later, killing Cylons and any humans who cooperated with them. She didn’t learn until long after it was over that Felix himself had been passing information to the Resistance, including the DRADIS codes that let them make contact with the human Fleet, dooming the New Caprica settlement for good and all.

Memories she’s accessed from other Eights usually combine seamlessly with memories of her own experiences, but some don’t want to blend as smoothly. She remembers one such from two different viewpoints, a few months after New Caprica: Boomer meeting Athena on board _Galactica_ , telling her that Hera was still alive and desperately ill. In the strange doubled memory, some of the emotions don’t match -- shock and denial and a sick feeling of betrayal on one side, resentment and vindictive satisfaction layered over a twisted half-conscious hope on the other -- while others match entirely too well. Each of them -- both Eights, both her sisters -- feels a swell of contempt and distrust at the sight of the other; each of them considers the other a traitor.

Their next meeting, over Hera’s crib on a basestar, she recalls only from Boomer’s point of view. It’s not hard at all to reconstruct Athena’s feelings, though; her determination to bring her daughter home was what brought her there, the final dominant state of mind as her husband fired the shot that would send her to download into a new body aboard the basestar, the last entry in the saved file of her memory. _I’m sorry, Karl, I’m so sorry; gods help anyone who tries to stop me; PAIN; Hera, hold on, I’m coming for you; end of line_.

Athena’s conviction is like a steel cable, solid and fixed. So is Boomer’s, but it’s fixed to a diametrically opposed certainty: _Humans and Cylons were not meant to be together_ , she says in the borrowed memory, and _I learned that on New Caprica_.

Everyone seems to draw a different lesson from New Caprica, in the year that follows it. How can anybody know what the right one is? How can there even be a basis for deciding what makes a lesson the right one?

She remembers the question, remembers thinking that maybe she’d found an answer: Boomer’s certainty is a constant misery to her, tangled together with self-loathing and bitterness, while Athena’s is a source of strength to her. Maybe that means Athena’s the one who got it right, she decides, and her life can be a model for the rest of them. Human and Cylon _can_ be together, if they can just somehow reach past the hate and start trusting each other.

When the Cylon suffer their first true rift, and Boomer sides with Cavil against the rest of her line, Sharon becomes even more sure that she’s right. It almost seems that circumstances are pushing them to learn that lesson: the rebel Cylon, the Sixes and Twos and Eights, have no choice now but to ally with the humans against their own kind. Maybe they can get it right this time. Maybe it really will be all right.

On the mission to rescue Three and destroy the Resurrection Hub, she reaches out to Helo -- not trying to replace Athena, not really, just to ... add something to those borrowed memories. Something of her own. If Athena can have something of her own (Boomer’s memory whispers within her), why can’t she? And of course it’s the wrong thing to do, and she should have known that, but ... she remembers loving Helo, remembers him loving her. Just like she remembers loving Galen, before everything went wrong for them; just like she remembers Felix, feeling something that might have been love, might have become love someday.

There is nothing quite like that feeling among the Cylon, anywhere. That, if nothing else, should be proof that they need humanity. Trust is the answer, trust has to be the answer. And maybe with the effective immortality of resurrection gone -- with that difference between them gone -- maybe there’ll be more common ground to build that trust on.

And she holds on to that hope, right up until Helo looks her in the eye and tells her that he’s following the President’s orders to renege on the deal, taking D’Anna -- and with her the knowledge of the Final Five -- into the sole custody of the Colonial Fleet.

 _Double-dealing_ , Three says with a kind of resigned contempt. _It’s very human. You never got that, Eight_.

 _I’m not saying I agree_ , Helo insists, pleading for -- what, some kind of understanding? Some exoneration from her? _I’m saying it’s my orders_.

And he’s not going to defy his orders. Not for her. She isn’t human, and she isn’t Athena. She’s just another Cylon.

 _So I pretty much just made a prize fool of myself, didn't I_. The bitterness is familiar on her tongue; it tastes of blood and bile, and feels like a bullet in the gut. _Trust_.

There’s no time for that conversation to go any further -- but that lesson stays with her, in her head, in the self that no longer has any place to go beyond this mortal body. In the thoughts that she doesn’t have to share with anybody else until she decides to.

Because the conclusion she’s come to is that Boomer was right all along. Humans and Cylons never _were_ meant to be together, and this alliance is every bit as doomed to failure as the long-abandoned settlement on New Caprica.

And if she needed any further clues, any more hints from God or Destiny or the uncaring universe, there are still two macabre punchlines to follow: the identities of three of the Final Five, and the dead surface of Earth.

Saul Tigh, Galen Tyrol, and Sam Anders. The three men who (believing themselves human) had formed the core of the violent Resistance on New Caprica, killing God alone knows how many of their own children. Anders, who set bombs under coffeehouses back on Caprica, risking his life for Cylon deaths. Tigh, who struck her across a self-inflicted wound in his rage at having let a Cylon past his guard, who later murdered his own wife for collaborating with them. Galen, whose face she can still see if she tries, twisted with fury at her for the crime of being what she was; whose hands she can still feel, shoving her away. Who tried to deny that he had ever loved her. Or that she had ever loved him: _software doesn’t have feelings_.

And Earth, the last hope for a home where they could all live in peace, as burnt and blasted as those hopes … and Three staying there when the rest of them left.

All the struggle, all the effort, all the pain, all the disillusionment. For nothing. Boomer was right. Of course Boomer was right; she was the first of them to stop lying to herself. There’s no way to get any sort of message to Boomer at this point, but Sharon wishes there were, wishes she could somehow tell her sister: _you were right. I understand now_.

Maybe there is still something she can do, though, some wedge she can drive into this disastrous alliance, to split it apart before they waste too many precious resources on tying themselves to the humans. If she can just find the right wedge, and the right place to drive it in … and maybe now she can do that. Now that she’s opened her eyes. Now that she’s seen what the world is really like.

Breaking someone’s trust is easy. Breaking someone’s will to trust is harder … but not impossible. Not at all.


	2. we'll dine upon each other

It has to be Felix, of course. There was never anybody else it could be. He’ll listen to her, he’ll trust her. And once he’s given her the opening she needs to convince him, down to his bones, that trusting her or anyone like her was the worst mistake he could ever have made … then she can turn him loose back in the Fleet, like a virus ready to start propagating itself.

She’ll be dead by then, if everything goes as she plans. She’s pretty much okay with that.

The hard part is over with by the time they jump: tapping into the passenger manifests for the shuttles; making sure she and Gaeta are scheduled to be on the same trip, with a few others; getting into and out of Raptor 718, unseen, before anyone else boards. The rest is easy.

It’s a little heartbreaking (in a distant, detached sort of way), talking to Felix again after all this time. He’s actually pleased to see her, when she tells him who she is. It doesn’t occur to him to question her evident pleasure at seeing him.

There’s a lot that it doesn’t occur to him to question. Though, to be fair, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone else either to ask the obvious question about the stripped pliers. It’s not as though any of them on board the Raptor had the opportunity to strip them after the jump, or for that matter any clear motive. Nobody seems to notice that, once she plants the idea that maybe _somebody didn’t like the idea of a machine breathing their air_. Nobody seems to remember that the entire point of bringing out the pliers was to fix the air scrubbers, which could have extended their shared oxygen supply well into a second week.

The other Sharon taking the pliers wasn’t what she planned, but it works well enough. Better than well enough -- the first death being a Cylon keeps things confused. More importantly, it keeps Gaeta confused. _It was an accident_ , he insists, and she lets him.

Her tears for her sister are real, but they would have been real no matter when she died.

Between the constant pain in his leg and the morpha, Felix clearly isn't thinking at his best; he doesn’t question her whispered warning, or ask why she wouldn’t share her idea to get home with all of them. Of course, with the lowered oxygen levels, nobody else is thinking too well either. She can hardly believe it when, despite the growing mistrust among them, not one of the humans suggests posting a guard while they sleep. It makes it almost too easy.

She doesn’t let her fingers tremble when she draws the packet of morpha out of Felix’s uniform jacket, or when she slides the first and then the second needle into Brooks’s arm, placing one empty syringe carefully in his hand, the other on the floor at his feet. He starts to wake up when she puts the packet back, but subsides without ever quite regaining consciousness.

 _Trust_ , she thinks, and the bitterness is distant and soft and somehow nostalgic.

It all begins to roll downhill after that, inevitably, with steadily increasing momentum. The others suspect her, of course, and insist on tying her wrists, and Felix looks as wretched as though he’s the one under suspicion. The scalpel she’s hidden up her sleeve does for her bindings once everybody drifts off again, and for the sleeping pilots’ throats, and for her palm in order to insert the data cable and restore the flipped bit in the memory address. She doesn’t need the cable, of course, since she knows exactly where the flipped bit is, but it’s a good distraction; it’ll keep Felix’s attention fixed firmly on her, and at the same time it’ll mean he won’t see that the “corrected” coordinates are actually a good ten hours away from the Fleet’s rendezvous point.

She barely has to lie at all, for this part. The data cable really does let her interface with the computer directly; the gash in her palm really does hurt, the lowered oxygen really is making her dizzy, the projected memory of New Caprica really does help. And she really can be glad to hear that Felix has someone now, if she immerses herself fully enough in the memory of how she felt about him back then. It doesn’t stop her from kissing him, and that dry distant bitter part of her notices that it doesn’t stop him from kissing her either.

Inevitable. Stones rolling downhill. The Raptor jumps, as close to the Fleet as it’s ever going to get; the DRADIS shows empty; the signal pulse goes out, to call them to come find their lost sheep, just short of too late. And Felix gets up to wake Finn and Esrin, to tell them they’re almost home.

Their blood paints his palms red, and wipes his face clean of every emotion but shock.

And it’s ... irritating, somehow, just how long that shock persists, how long he fails to realize how much of a fool he’s made of himself. _We needed the air_ , she tells him. _I protected you from something you could never have done, but you were thinking all along_.

 _No_ , he cries, and lunges to wrench the cable out of her hand -- but even now he doesn’t understand, even now his expression is more shock than rage, wounded and lost, still hoping somehow for all this to make some benign kind of sense. _I couldn’t. No one could_.

No one could, he says, his hands still wet with the evidence that she _has_.

The rage that goes through her is thick and feverish, churning in her like nausea, and for the first time she feels like she may actually hate him. How can he still have that much innocence left, she rages silently, struggling with it. How can he, how _dare_ he --

 _There is a fine line_ , she tells him, letting the scorn well up in her voice, _between ignorance and hope. Felix, you have to open your eyes. You have to see what the world is really like._

The list of names, on New Caprica. If the truth won’t do it, she’ll find a lie that will.

_There's not much difference between my brain and yours, Felix. We can choose ... to not make the connection. You can see someone kill in front of you, twice -- and still hang on to your ignorance._

She knows he’s picked up the discarded scalpel; she gazes off into the middle distance, so as not to see him lift it.

_Instead of a flaw, you call it ... hope._

Projecting isn’t easy in the thinned air, but she manages.

_Faith._

It’s Helo’s face in front of her, to bring all the self-mocking bitterness back.

_Love._

The stone she’s set rolling downhill may yet set off an avalanche; there’s every chance that no one, human or Cylon, will ever know her part in it; the word _trust_ is on her tongue, ready to be spoken; end of line.


End file.
